Docs refresh (work-in-progress)

Wow, only a couple years later and this part already feels a bit out of date. 16 core machines aren't that high end anymore, and having many tens of GB of RAM is no longer out of the question. 

Not that the underlying point has changed; we could just tweak the phrasing here maybe a little bit. Mostly I'm just amused to have Moore's law already outdating my documentation from not that long ago!